1/20/16

Dharma Talk, January 11, 2016: The Way to Buddhahood

Good evening to everybody and hello to those who are listening by way of the Internet. Tonight is January 11, 2016 our regular Monday night class. I want to continue on a little bit with what we were talking about last week, but with less emphasis on the passing of lives and more emphasis on living and understanding our practice.

Before we get into it, I want to go over a few passages in this particular book, which is called The Way to Buddhahood by Venerable Yin-Shun. In the very beginning of this book, he’s reading some verses that are very valuable to understand.

The first verse is:

The sea of existence has no boundaries.

The world is full of worry and suffering.

Flowing and turning, rising and falling.

Is there no place of refuge and support?

He’s talking about the human condition, and he’s saying that this existence has no boundaries—there are different potentialities here—but this world is full of worrying and suffering.

How many of you worried and suffered today? It’s just the way it is sometimes since you’re in this human condition. So he’s saying right from the beginning, “I get you. I understand where you’re coming from. Hang in there. We’re going to go through this, and it’s going to be ok.” He’s already telling you what the practice is all about.

Then he says “Flowing and turning, rising and falling. Is there no place of refuge and support?” So the question is how do I get out of this? How do I get out of this worry? How do I get out of this anxiety; all of these different things that are upsetting me and causing me disturbance in my mind?

I’m going to read a little bit of his commentary. He says,

“If one takes refuge, one must do so with sincerity.”

Refuge means that one is set upon the path of practice. They’ve said, “I’m really interested in this and I’m going to practice with my whole heart. I recognize that if I follow the steps in what I’m hearing, it will help me remove at least a portion of my suffering, if not a great portion, and perhaps cause me to become liberated.” One has to really say, “I’m going to do this.”

He uses this really good analogy.

“Consider the life or death situation of one who is fallen into the billowing waves of an ocean and cannot see the shore.”

So here one has fallen overboard as if in a storm, and they cannot see the shore. All they can see is the ocean rising and falling, rising and falling.

“Upon catching sight of a clump of seaweed or a patch of foam, one will reach out to grasp it; or, hearing the sound of the wind or birds, one will scream for help.”

You’re going to be screaming for help to the wind. Screaming for help to the birds.

There’s an interesting Geico commercial where a man is sinking in quicksand in the middle of a desert and there’s a cat sitting there watching him. He tries to ask the cat to go for help. Well, obviously, the cat just looks at him like, “Meow?” That’s not a place to seek refuge. The cat’s not going to help you. The foam is illusory. The seaweed won’t support you or float you.

“With only the thought to live, one’s wish to be saved is very deep, very sincere.”

I want to live! I want to live! I don’t want to drown!

“If a ship passes by and sailors throw down ropes or life-preservers, will one not instantly grab one and climb aboard the ship? The sincerity with which one seeks refuge should match this. Only then one will achieve the wonderful merits of taking refuge.”

So, when you come to this class. When you read about the Dharma—the Dharma being the readings of the Chan School and the Buddhadharma—if you embrace these as a life-preserver, it will work for you. It will float you. It will save. Not the ego, but it will save the mind from suffering.

This is how we approach the practice. We don’t approach it and go, “Oh yea, that’s kind of nice, but I still like to suffer.” Then we’re picking up the foam. We say, “I’ll take this pill; I will go get a message; I will watch something on TV; a gallon of chocolate ice cream might be good at this moment.” All these things are not really helpful to you, but you see them as comforts. When you practice whole-heartedly, then you begin to see what the medicine really is.

I remember when I was a little kid, and kid you not, my mom used to give us this stuff when we coughed, named 666. We would suppress our coughs as much as we could to avoid taking this medicine, because it was so bad. It looked like kind of yellow, and it seemed like it really was brought up from below to vex little kids. It made you stop coughing even before you took it; “No mom, it’s alright. I’m not coughing; see?”

Sometimes the medicine is initially very bitter, very astringent, but nevertheless we need to take it. It doesn’t help us just to put a cherry-flavored, sugary cough drop in our mouth. That’s not the real medicine. We want to take the real medicine, the medicine that will make us feel better.

So this is an important aspect of our practice. If you want to be practitioners, vow to take the medicine. I’m not telling you that you have to jump into a pot of boiling oil. I’m telling you to jump out of that pot, but you have to let go of the self, and you have a very difficult time sometimes being able to let go of that self.

He continues on with the verse:

Accumulation of wealth and riches can be lost.

Those with fame and high status can fall.

Those who are together may be scattered.

Those who are born must die.”

The well-governed state must fall into chaos.

The world once formed faces destruction;

Of the pleasures and certainties of life,

None can be relied upon.”

A long time ago there was a beer commercial with a group of men sitting by a river with their feet propped up on a railing having some bonding time and the slogan was: “It doesn’t get much better than this.” I just looked at it and thought, “No, you guys have to aspire to something a little better than that.” This is what he’s talking about. That moment is a fleeting moment. We’ve all had a wonderful time watching the sunset with somebody, or even by ourselves and we’ve seen beautiful things. How long do they last? How long does a rainbow last? And yet we think about wanting to see those things or we want to go back and experience something again. It’s a losing battle when we do that because as we do it, we are attaching to these worldly things.

This master Yin-Shun talks about different attachments that we have in this life, and the first one he mentions is accumulation of wealth and riches. Now I know all of you are vastly wealthy and you carefully guard your horde of riches. Or, if you’re not wealthy, and you see a wealthy man or woman you may say “Ah, one day I’ll be able to afford that kind of a purse or shoes or whatever.” In either case, you suffer because you’re attaching to creature comforts that are there, but are impermanent. You won’t take them with you when you go.

The next one he mentions is fame and high status. This is one that some of you might have in your lives, fame and high status in whatever you are doing. When you have this, you don’t want people to take it away. It can even be the pecking order at work. You may think, “I am first in command; you can’t talk to me like that.”

I remember I went to a retreat and this young man was outside in grungy clothes, because when you go to a retreat you wear kind of grungy clothes, and he was looking disheveled and sweeping the sidewalk as people were walking by in Queens—in Queens of all places where people kind of look at you funny anyways. After the retreat he said, “But none of those people really knew that I was the timekeeper.” That was his high status. He was the timekeeper at the retreat. “Hey I’m the timekeeper. Don’t look at me like I’m just sweeping the sidewalk like a bum.”

I had to laugh because I was in the same situation sweeping that sidewalk and I didn’t think anything of it. When we cling to something, then we get embarrassment from it, or we’re sad if we get knocked down a notch in whatever we do. Then that causes us more and more suffering, and fame is very, very fleeting.

Then we have the third attachment, which is the togetherness of beloved family, and the family can be people here in this group, people in your own family or people at work. As some of you know, last month we lost two of our beloved family members. This is natural. These things happen. Whether you’re famous like David Bowie, who just passed away, or you’re somebody who’s just famous in a group like our members, death takes them equally.

So when you look at things, you’re clear that they are constantly changing, and that people are constantly changing. Sometimes in a family, siblings will align on one side and they’ll fight the other side, and then they’ll switch it around again. This causes suffering. We ask, “Why do they treat us this way?” or “Why does this person treat this person this way?” I’ve known families where the mother treated the child very horribly, and really messed up the child. The child went through life trying to fathom why the mother did the things she did to it. This is another attachment that comes.

Another attachment is to life itself, and this is probably the biggest bugaboo because you attach to this life and only this living has meaning to you. Not what you’re doing with this life, but the fact that you’re alive. You have this life and realize it. But it’s like holding onto sand - little by little, this sand falls from the palms and the fingers and sifts through.

We never really see that. We approach this life as if we’re immortal. We shove this into a dark corner, defer it to some other time when we can deal with it, figuring we have plenty of time until we start looking at our watch and gauging how long we have to live. Then you start worrying about it.

The attachment to life is very important because it’s very destructive. There’s a saying that “A man has less than a century to live, but has a thousand years of problems to worry about.” There are a few people in this room that are this way. If we gave you a thousand years to live, you would be worrying every single day. You don’t see things very clearly. You need to take just this breath and understand just this breath is vital. This is not attaching to living. It’s looking into reality and saying, “What did I do with this breath? Did I waste it or did I do something with it?”

The next one is kind of an interesting one. It’s prosperity for one’s country. You don’t think that’s a big attachment until you look at an event like the recent terrorist attack in France, where the terrorists went in and shot a bunch of people. Now, all the sudden, people take a big affront. Now, they’re looking for someone to kill, someone to be responsible. The United States went through that with 9/11. We’re always looking for some way to punish someone, even if it’s not directly the person that hurt us, we have to get somebody. I’m not saying that one should not be naturalistic in their way, but one should not be naturalistic in a way that harms all other people who are on the planet.

An interesting attachment that he brings up is progress in society. You think, “Well that’s probably pretty good. You know, we should be making progress as a society.” But he brings up this point, “Some people think that since human beings are social animals and civilization progresses, this must be the true meaning of life,” to make this place a better place. Not bad. Why bother seeking refuge for one’s self alone? In terms of this he says,

This is the bias of seeing the whole but not the individual. Provisionally, the progress of society and culture might be regarded as the true meaning of life. But the social activities of humankind depend on the world we live in (the earth), and these activities cannot be separated from space we occupy (even if we could move to another world, it would be the same). However, this world is in the process of cycling from formation to destruction and destruction to formation. Consider this for this moment: one day the earth will be destroyed and then what will become of the civilization and the true meaning of life?

It’s very interesting, because this great master is saying that you can’t even make your life’s goal to benefit society and be a do-gooder and erect a statue in the park that pigeons can sit on. He’s saying all that is transitory. Even this world is not going to be here that long, because it’s only here as long as the Sun is burning. Now we might not be around at that point, but the Sun could burn up at any moment or explode. We don’t really know. This can’t be the true meaning of life.

So he’s saying that we need to look further, look deeper, look at this place, look at all of this; it cannot just be the collected egos of all us making us all feel comfortable. Or us all getting new shoes that make everybody feel good. They’re going to wear out. He’s looking at more than that. What is this place? When you back away from the Earth and you see the Earth in relationship to the cosmos, you begin look at this place and think “You know what? This is really not so big of a place.”

I remember going back to a place I lived in during college and I thought, “How did I live in this place? It’s like eight by ten, the size of a jail cell.” But when I was there, I thought it was great because I was ignorant of how big spaces could be.

I remember once, too, going on a camping trip and camping underneath the stars. That will tell you how long ago it was that I had enough energy to camp under the stars without a tent, and I was even in Montana! Then coming back to my little place, my apartment, I felt so confined because that space was so small compared to the outdoors. Imagine in relationship to the whole cosmos how small we are, and we begin to look at things from a different viewpoint. Not the viewpoint of the ego, but the viewpoint as it really is. We could be living in the sweat bead of a gigantic elephant. Who knows? We haven’t gone out that far to see.

So what is meant by this human condition? Last week we discussed the investigation of birth and death, and what that meant was that the masters were saying “If you really want to get down to it, you have to look into this great matter of birth and death.” We begin to understand that all of these things are causes and conditions, and that these causes and conditions never fail. What these masters are really saying is investigate mind—not consciousness, not what arises in mind—but investigate mind itself.

What is mind? Where is mind not? If we go out to the outer reaches of the cosmos, is mind there? Of course! How else could it be perceived? We cannot say how mind is created. We can only say that mind exists. Consciousness exists, but only as a temporary reaction under causes and conditions within mind, rising, falling, rising, falling. We do not put much investment in those appearances, other than the practice itself. What we want to do is ask “How did those things get there? How did that thought come up in mind? Where did that thought go to?” You begin to see things from a different viewpoint—not from the viewpoint of the self, but experientially from allowing the self to drop off.

What we come to is a clear understanding. Essentially, we step back, and what we step back from is the ego. We pull back from that, and no longer lay claim to that ego as us, as an individual self, as a personality or a life in being. And we start playing this what-if game. If we’re all appearing in mind, and this mind that enables you to appear and me to appear is collectively one, then there’s no difference between us. All the things that arise within it don’t interfere with it. They don’t make it either sacred or profane. It just allows those things to arise impeccably through causes and conditions.

So if one wakes up and says, “I’m worried. I have anxiety.” Guess what? For the whole day, you’re going to have worry and anxiety. If you think, “I am suffering,” guess what? You’re going to suffer because you put it there. Nobody else put it there. You put it there by thinking, “I am suffering in this moment.” When I took the 666 medicine as a child, I was suffering because I was ignorant that the medicine was something beneficial to me. All I could see was the horrible taste, and I couldn’t see that it could be good for me.

If my mom at that point, because I’m such a young child, offered me a lollipop and said, “This will make you feel better,” I would take it! And I’d be licking and coughing, licking and coughing. But as we grow up, we put aside these things. We stop holding onto the seaweed. We stop holding onto the foam. We hold onto the practice, because the practice is the medicine that can help us, and take away the suffering that we have.

If one begins to practice, you can take away thirty or forty percent of your suffering in a relatively short time period. If you can continue to practice, eighty percent. The last twenty percent is a little bit difficult, but you can still work at it, and work at it, and work at it. This is why you have a method. You are not clinging to something that is illusory. You’re having faith that the mind works in this way. If I practice in this way, and put down attachments, then I will gain peace. I will gain liberation.

You begin in this way, and you continue until there’s no idea of “I” gaining peace or “I” gaining liberation.” One just simply practices, and our practice becomes impeccable. If our practice becomes impeccable, there’s no longer any practice. It’s simply that one has become a Buddha. Along the way, is where we practice.

As we step back away from the ego, what we’re doing is stepping away from perfumed impressions. Now perfumed impressions means that at any moment we are adding to reality. So at this moment, if I were to sing a song, you might say, “Well, that was pretty silly,” or “He has wonderful voice,” or “He’s really out of tune.” All of those are impressions. You’re no longer hearing the voice. You’re no longer hearing the sound. You’re attaching something that isn’t there. The same thing happens when you eat something and you attach something to it. Is that permanent? Maybe; maybe not.

If one eats strawberries, and you think, “Oh these strawberries are so good,” how many quarts of strawberries do you think it would take before you start thinking, “If I eat another strawberry, I’m going to puke?” Those are all impressions based on causes and conditions. What I’m saying is that in any situation, in any environment, any moment, there is arising some kind of a sensory object. Whether it’s a sensory object in the mind or a sensory object before your eyes, or sensations of sound, taste, or touch, all these things are arising along with sub-impressions.

So we have a gross sensation: I’m eating a strawberry. And then we have the sub-impression: sweet, tart, wonderful! Or: last time I ate this I got a stomachache, not good! All of these are sub-impressions that are arising. We take that to be us thinking. We take that to be us as our ego, but they’re simply coming up because we’re perfuming what’s before us with all of these impressions, and we see this as some form of a stream of consciousness. The stream of consciousness is illusory. It is only there as long as we continue to add more and more to it, and we don’t see that these little sub-impressions are arising.

We see the strawberry and we recognize it, and then we have these sub-impressions: “I want one; I hope I can get one before they’re all gone; I need to get it; there’s Bill and he always takes the last one; Bill’s not a good person.” How did Bill get there? You put him there! And all of these things come up. So when Bill is in front of you eating the last strawberry, you look at him and think “I wish I could slap him.” Where did that come from? It came from all of your impressions. Next time you see Bill, guess what? You’re going to think, “He ate the last strawberry. He’s not a good person.”

All these things come up from causes and conditions. Of course, I’m using very silly reactions as examples, but the idea is solid. All of these things are coming up in mind because you put them there, these impressions. And you cannot see them coming up. All you saw originally was a strawberry, and then all these other things sneak up too, and you think that that’s your ego. It’s not really your ego. It’s really just these moment-to-moment impressions that are arising in the mind that perfume, or color, or give some sort of mental impression, to what is occurring in that moment.

It could be a thought in your mind: “Ah, the beach in the summertime. Ah, beautiful. So fun! I’m surfing.” All of these things collectively come up in your mind. It could be that you’re at work and the boss walks towards you, and you think “Oh my gosh, I cannot stand him.” That’s a horrible thing to not be able to stand your boss because you’re going to see him everyday. You make your own little hell there. Does anybody have your own little hell that you’ve made on this planet?

This is what Chan is. This is what our practice is. We see things clearly in this way. We see all of these sub-thoughts, sub-causes, producing these conditional events and these conditional impressions.

In terms of our practice, we begin to see and take responsibility for what comes up in our minds. We start seeing that we’re the one planting these seeds in mind and we look at it, and we don't delegate it to a supreme being by saying, “It’s God’s will.” We understand and take responsibility for what’s there, and we deal with it. We deal with the conditions, and we try not to create negative causes from those conditions.

I once had this one client, an elderly lady, who I was court-appointed to represent, and her family was fighting over her. One faction wanted her and the other faction wanted her too, and she was playing in the middle. Even as they were wheeling her into the courtroom, one side of the family was behind her and she waved on the sly to other side. I thought, “Wow, she’s causing this whole battle.”

When I got her to my office, I asked her “Where do you want to live?” She said, “Well, if God wants me to live with this family, I’ll go there. If God wants me to live with the other side of the family, I’ll go there.” I was not happy to hear this because she was just playing this game. I said to her, “And what if God wants you to be out on the street?” She just looked at me totally shocked, and I said, “That’s a possibility too when they get tired of you playing these games.”

It shook her up, because she was causing it, but her ego was too sly and self-conceited, and getting so attention from both sides of the family, to understand the havoc she was wreaking within the family. This family would not probably see each other again until she was in a coffin, and they were paying their last respects. She couldn’t see that. Unfortunately, in spite of her age, she didn’t have wisdom to see that.

So what we do is look at the things that we set into motion. We see them clearly and we see the results of them. We all have in our lives set into motion some pretty crummy things, but we’ve also set into motion some pretty good things, positive things. That's the joy and the wonder of the practice itself: the fact that we set into motion very positive things, because we understand how mind works. Causes and conditions never fail. If we really try hard with our practice, we can create really positive things here. That’s the real wonder of the practice; understanding that mind works impeccably in this way. We just have to be careful what we put into mind. I once had a client that was a teacher, and the vice principal of her school was her petty tyrant. The vice principal would go into the classroom, sit in the back, and take notes while trying to find something she could use to complain about this teacher. One day, when the vice principal left the classroom, the teacher formulated in her mind, “I wish she would just break a leg.” The next moment she heard from outside, “Ow!!!” And lo and behold, the lady broke her leg.

When we look at this, it’s very interesting, because we can say that’s instant karma. It’s a very, very powerful thing that happens in this way. You don’t disregard that, but you look at it from a different viewpoint. You look at it from the viewpoint that you can do very miraculous things, very positive things, by setting your mind to do the proper conduct and helping people out.

What we need to do is take care of self. Not necessarily in a gang style, like shoot them up, but take care of the self. We have to see what the self is. Little by little understand the self, understand what we’re putting into the self. By taking care of it, and understanding it little by little, the self will be removed from us. We won’t even notice it’s going. Eventually, the self will be gone. Will it come back? If you let it. If you leave the door open to it, it will keep coming back in, but you keep taking it out.

One monk asked the master, “What if I can’t do that?” And he answered, “Just take it out.” And he asked, “What if it refuses to go?” And the master replied, “Just throw it.” The idea is that you be impeccable in your practice. You have to have this resolve to “throw it out.” It doesn’t mean that you hate the self; you understand the self. By understanding yourself, you understand people around you and you understand why they react to you the way that they do.

People can react to you in a negative way or a positive way depending on how you are. When you become aware of this, that’s stepping back and seeing your “self” as you’re operating in the environment. We hardly ever see ourselves that way. We’re in a play but we don’t realize we’re actors. We don’t know how to play our part, and generally we play our part very poorly. We just suffer.

How are you doing today? “Miserable, horrible, I worry, I have anxiety, I have this, I have that.” But it’s so easy to say, “I’m doing ok. Today’s a better day. I’m vertical.” That’s a really positive thing so you can start with that. If you’re vertical, that means good. If you’re horizontal, maybe not so good—especially if you’re below ground. If you’re vertical, that gives you a chance, and if you’re horizontal, you become the best horizontal person you can be. You practice in this way.

When we say, “taking care of the self,” it’s not taking care of the self in the sense of self-love or self-conceit or egocentrism. What we’re doing is looking at what the self is attaching to. We’re mindful of this. Mindfulness here is of how mind works. The more we allow the self to attach, the more there will be attachments in mind. If we recognize those attachments, there’s less likelihood that those attachments will arise the next time. We begin to see the clearly the forces at work.

Life is very interesting, because there are so many different things that are happening at any given moment. You’re not going to be able to see them all, but at least you recognize that there are forces at work.

There’s a story about an ancient master that went to this farming town, and when he went, the people said, “Ah, here he comes this incredible monk! The incredible monk is here!” Everybody was so happy to see him. They brought him into town, and told him, “It’s auspicious that you came today, because there’s a wedding.” So they invited him to sit at the banquet.

As he was sitting there looking at all the people, he said, “So incredible! So incredible! So interesting! So interesting!” He looked at all the people smiling and laughing.

They asked him, “What do you see monk? What do you see?”

He said, “It’s very interesting that the husband and wife were donkeys in a past lifetime, all the people were farm animals, and the grandma was cooking in a pot.”

He was able to see all these different types of karmic forces. You don’t need to see these types of karmic forces, but you might become aware of them when you have an affinity towards a person or no affinity towards a person, and you understand the karmic forces at work. You don’t need to see exactly what has happened, but you understand that these forces are there. People like this particular monk that are very prescient are able to see these aspects of people, but the lesson is that he was aware of the forces at work. Being aware of it, makes it easier for him to harmonize with the people, and to teach, and do the things that he needs to do.

I’m going to quit there because I have three more pages of notes, so will pick it up here next week. Are there any questions about what I was talking about?

Student: Who is the guy who wrote the book?

Gilbert: Yin-Shun. He’s actually a modern-day master. He’s a very good and very well recognized master that pre-dated Master Sheng-Yen by a little bit. He’s very, very well-respected. Reading his Dharma is like Master Sheng-Yen’s, which is very simple, to the point, very clear. That’s the best Dharma when you can pick it up and use it tomorrow. That’s what I’m trying to give to you, something that you can use tomorrow to help you. It’s very important that it becomes relevant to what you’re doing in your life now. That’s what Chan is.

Oftentimes, we talk about what mind is in a very, very deep and profound definitions, but, as one gains experience in the practice, these deep and profound definitions, really return you to the ordinary and the mundane—to nothing special. When one get’s back to the point when nothing is special, we realize just this ordinary mind that you’re using, is the best mind. You don’t have to make it special.